The Essential Gandhi (52 page)

But I do not agree that our thirty years’ probation in non-violence has been utterly wasted. It was due to our non-violence, defective though it was, that we were able to bear up under the heaviest repression, and the message of independence penetrated every nook and corner of India. But as our non-violence was the non-violence of the weak, the leaven did not spread. Had we adopted non-violence as the weapon of the strong, because we realize that it was more effective than any other weapon, in fact, the mightiest force in the world, we would have made use of its full potency and not have
discarded it as soon as the fight against the British was over, or we were in a position to wield conventional weapons.… If we had the atom bomb, we would have used it against the British.
¹⁶

[Widespread Moslem attacks on Hindus had taken place during October, 1946, in the distant Noakhali and Tippera rural areas of East Bengal. These seemed to alarm the Mahatma more than urban disturbances. Hitherto, interreligious amity had prevailed in India’s villages. Gandhi decided to go to Noakhali.]

I find myself in the midst of exaggeration and falsity. I am unable to discover the truth. There’s terrible mutual distrust. Oldest friendships have snapped.…

My suggestion to the [Moslem] League Ministers is that they should give us one honest and brave Moslem to accompany one equally honest and brave Hindu for each affected village. They should guarantee, at the cost of their lives if need be, the safety of returning Hindu refugees. I am sorry to have to confess that without some such thing it seems to me difficult to induce them to return to their villages. From all accounts received by me, life is not as yet smooth and safe for the minority community in the villages. They, therefore, prefer to live as exiles from their own homes, crops, plantations and surroundings and live on inadequate and ill-balanced doles.
¹⁷

 … I have no watertight divisions such as religious, political and others. Let us not lose ourselves in the forest of words. Is the tangle to be solved violently or non-violently—that is the question.…
¹⁸

[But worse woes were in store. In the neighboring province of Bihar, with a population of thirty-one million Hindus and five million Moslems, the events in Noakhali and Tipper had incensed the majority community. October 25 was declared “Noakhali Day.” Thousands of Hindus paraded the streets and country lanes shouting
“Blood for blood.” In the next week, “the number of persons officially verified as killed by rioters,” wrote the Delhi correspondent of the London
Times
, was four thousand, five hundred and eighty. Gandhi later put the total at more than ten thousand. The victims were preponderantly Moslem.

Gandhi went to Noakhali to teach the Noakhali Hindus to be brave by being brave with them. He lived in forty-nine villages, rising at four in the morning, walking three or four miles on bare feet to a village, staying there one or two or three days talking and praying with the inhabitants, and then trekking on to the next village. Arriving in a place, he would go to a peasant’s hut, preferably a Moslem’s hut, and ask to be taken in with his companions. If rebuffed, he would try the next hut. He subsisted on local fruits and vegetables and goat’s milk if he could get it. This was his life from November 7, 1946 to March 2, 1947. He had just passed his seventy-seventh birthday.

Gandhi’s task in Noakhali consisted in restoring inner calm so that the refugee Hindus could return and feel safe and so that the Moslems would not attack them again.

Gandhi might have sent a message from Delhi or preached a sermon. But he was a man of action. He believed that the difference between what we do and what we could do would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems.

The division of India caused the violent deaths of hundreds of thousand of Indians. It caused fifteen million refugees to wander from their homes into distant uncertainty. It provoked the war in Kashmir.

Gandhi saw that no Pakistan was possible unless the Congress Party accepted it, for they could not split India and antagonize the majority in order to please Jinnah and the minority. Nobody listened to Gandhi. The Congress Party leaders were afraid to delay independence.]

This day, 26th January, is Independence Day. This observance was quite appropriate when we were fighting for Independence we had not seen nor handled. Now! We have handled it and we seem to be disillusioned. At least I am, even if you are not.

What are we celebrating today? Surely not our disillusionment. We are entitled to celebrate the hope that the worst is over and that we are on the road to showing the lowliest of the villagers that it
means his freedom from serfdom and that he is no longer a serf born to serve the cities and towns of India but that he is destined to exploit the city dwellers for the advertisement of the finished fruits of well-thought-out labors, that he is the salt of the Indian earth, that it means also equality of all classes and creeds, never the domination and superiority of the major community over a minor, however insignificant it may be in number or influence. Let us not defer the hope and make the heart sick. Yet what are the strikes and a variety of lawlessness but a deferring of the hope? These are symptoms of our sickness and weakness.… I wonder if we can remain free from the fever of power politics, or the bid for power which afflicts the political world, the East and West. [Let] us permit ourselves to hope that though geographically and politically India is divided into two, at heart we shall ever be friends and brothers helping and respecting one another and be one for the outside world.
¹⁹

[Out of the part of the Punjab assigned to Pakistan, moving in the direction of New Delhi, came millions of Hindus and Sikhs fleeing the knives and clubs of Moslems. Out of the Indian Union, moving toward Pakistan, came millions of Moslems fearing the daggers and lathis of Hindus and Sikhs. Police and even the military were animated by the same passions as the aggressors and often helped them to loot and kill.

The Nehru government set up camps outside Delhi to catch the migrants before they entered the city. Gandhi visited several. He went as often as he could to both Hindu and Moslem camps. He preached self-help.]

[Government] control gives rise to fraud, suppression of truth, intensification of the black market and artificial scarcity. Above all, it unmans the people and deprives them of initiative, it undoes the teaching of self-help they have been learning for a generation. It makes them spoon-fed. This is a tragedy next only, if indeed not equal to, the fratricide on a vast scale and the insane exchange of population resulting in unnecessary deaths, starvation and want of
proper residence and clothing, more poignant for the coming of inclement weather.…
²⁰

[President Truman advised] the American people that they should eat less bread and thus save the much-needed grain for starving Europe. He added that Americans would not lose in health by the recommended act of self-denial. I tender my congratulations to President Truman on this philanthropic gesture. I must decline … the suggestion that at the back of this philanthropy there is a sordid motive of deriving a pecuniary advantage for America. A man must be judged by his action, not the motive prompting it.… If many must die of starvation, let us at least earn the credit of having done our best in the way of self-help, which ennobles a nation.
²¹

I have not the least doubt that this tragedy can be turned to good account by the correct behavior of the sufferers.… In this consummation, I have no doubt that all specially qualified men and women such as doctors, lawyers … nurses, traders and bankers should make common cause with the others and lead a coördinated camp life in perfect coöperation, feeling not like helpless dependents on charity, but resourceful, independent men and women making light of their sufferings, a life fully of promise for the future and worthy of imitation by the people amongst whom the camp life is lived. Then, when the professional people have been inured to corporate, unselfish life and when they can be spared from these camps, they would branch out into villages … shedding the fragrance of their presence wherever they may happen to be.
²²

 … I have never recognized the necessity of the military. But that is not to say that nothing good can come out of it. It gives valuable lessons in discipline, corporate existence, sanitation, and an exact time-table containing provision for every useful activity. There is almost pin-drop silence in such camps.… I would like our refugee camps to approach that ideal. Then there is no inconvenience, rain or no rain.

These camps become quite inexpensive provided all work, including the building up of this canvas city, is done by the refugees who are their own sweepers, cleaners, road-makers, trench-diggers, cooks, washermen. No work is too low for them. Every variety of work connected with the camp is equally dignified. Careful and enlightened supervision can bring about the desirable and necessary revolution in social life. Then indeed the present calamity would be turned into a blessing in disguise. Then no refugee will become a burden wherever he goes. He will never think of himself alone, but will always think of the whole of his fellow sufferers and never want for himself what his fellows cannot have. This is not to be done by brooding but by prompt action.…
²³

The citizens of Delhi and the refugees have a heavy task in front of them. Let them seek occasions for meeting together as often as possible in perfect mutual trust. It was a soul-stirring sight for me to meet Moslem sisters in large numbers yesterday.… They were in purdah [heavy veiling of the face], most of them.… I suggested that they would not have the purdah before their fathers or brothers. Why should they think me less? And off went the purdah without exception. This is not the first time that the purdah has disappeared before me. I mention the incident to illustrate what genuine love, as I claim mine to be, is able to do. The Hindu and Sikh women should go to the Moslem sisters and establish friendship with them. They should invite them on ceremonial occasions and be invited. Moslem girls and boys should be attracted to common schools, not communal. They should mix in sports.… Delhi is poorer for the disappearance of the exquisite workmanship of the Moslems. It is a miserable and miserly thing for the Hindus and Sikhs to wish to take away from them their means of livelihood.… In this great country of ours there is room for all.… The condition of keeping me in your midst is that all the communities in India live at peace with one another, not by force of arms but that of love, than which there is no better cement to be found in the world.
²⁴

[One] will lose nothing by believing. Disbelief is a treacherous mate. Let him beware. For my part, I am unrepentant. I have trusted all my life with my eyes open. I propose to trust [my] Moslem friends too till they prove themselves untrue. Trust begets trust. It gives you strength to combat treachery.…
²⁵

[Like] the brave men and women that we ought to be under hard-earned freedom, we should trust even those whom we may suspect as our enemies. Brave people disdain distrust.…
²⁶

You must not lose faith in humanity. If a few drops are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.
²⁷

[October 2, 1947, was the Mahatma’s seventy-eighth birthday. Sheaves of telegrams were delivered from abroad and all parts of India.]

Where do congratulations come in? Would it not be more appropriate to send condolences? There is nothing but anguish in my heart. Time was whatever I said the masses followed. Today, mine is a lone voice in India.

Many friends had hoped that I would live to be 125, but I have lost all desire to live long—let alone to 125. I could not live while hatred and killing fill the atmosphere.
²⁸

[As a Hindu, Gandhi was sternest with Hindus.]

 … We should never make the mistake of thinking that we never make any mistakes. The bitterest critic is bitter because he has some grudge, fancied or real, against us. We shall set him right if we are patient with him, and whenever the occasion arises, show him his error or correct our own, when we are to be found in error.… Undoubtedly, balance is to be preserved. Discrimination is ever necessary. Deliberately mischievous statements have to be ignored.…

 … Nature has so made us that we do not see our backs, it is
reserved for others to see them. Hence it is wise to profit by what they see.
²⁹

 … The misdeeds of Hindus in the Union [of India] have to be proclaimed by Hindus from the housetops, if those of the Moslems in Pakistan are to be arrested or stopped.
³⁰

[The killings in Delhi had ceased. Gandhi’s presence in the city had produced its effect. But he was still in “agony.” With his fingertips, he sensed the danger of a new wave of riots.

On January 13, 1948, Mahatma Gandhi commenced his last fast. It engraved an image of goodness on India’s brain.

The fast, Gandhi declared on the first day, was directed to the conscience of all—to the Hindus and Moslems in the India Union and to the Moslems of Pakistan.]